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PhilGoetz comments on Is altruistic deception really necessary? Social activism and the free market - Less Wrong Discussion
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There a lot of wrong with that paragraph. The main problem is that's based on the lies. The lie that the political spectrum being well partitionated into left and right. After that none of the Democratic presidential candidates are Marxists the suggestion that they are is deeply flawed. In 2008 the Democrats outraised the Republicans. They got more money for corporate donors. In the election Obama had more economic professors as economic advisors than McCain who had a bunch of supply side advisors which happens to be a strain of thought not believed to represent the truth by mainstream economists.
In 2008 Berny Sanders isn't raising money from corporate donors. On the other hand he supports the status quo enough to pledge to support Hillary Clinton should she be elected, even when people like Ralph Nader think that giving away a lot of power to influence change.
On thing that most economists agree on is that free trade is great. The leading Republican presidential candidate doesn't believe in free trade. It was disgust in 1988 of how US politicians allow free access to US market to foreign actions and then talked that it the issue might motivate him to run for office in the future.
Lastly it was Marx who came up with the idea of seeing everything as a struggle of capitalism vs. marxism. It's worth noting that you are advocating for marxist ideas.
A. People who believe that free competition between goods and companies will lead to high social utility are also likely to believe that free competition between ideas will lead to high social utility.
B. Capitalists have more faith in the free market than Marxists do.
C. Republicans have more faith in the free market than Democrats do.
Suppose B and C are true. If A is true, then we should find, all else being equal, that Marxists lie more than capitalists, and that Democrats lie more than Republicans.
I agree I should have worded my post differently, but I did not mean to imply that Democrats are Marxists, or share any traits with them. Only that they contrast with Republicans along the free-trade dimension in the same direction that Marxists contrast with "capitalists".
What evidence do you have for that claim to be true?
That really depends on how you define the terms. Marx thought that free markets are really powerful. Powerful enough that change via democratic institutions is impossible and the only possible way to create systematic political change is through violent revolution.
That depends really on the issue and the people involved.
Trump thinks that the free market does work less well internationally than Clinton and has to free trade as currently practiced is bad for the US.
Republicans on the whole are more opposed to the act of sex being sold on the free market.
The comment, and the original statement in the post, which you are replying to, is the proposed evidence. I'm not setting forth A as evidence to prove something else; I'm setting forth other evidence in favor of A.
You're right that Republicans aren't pure libertarians. Here's a poll saying that Democrats currently support free trade more than Republicans do.
Foreign trade shouldn't be included for this purpose, however. "Belief in the free market" means believing that a free market maximizes social utility for everyone participating in the market. When considering foreign trade, a US politician isn't considering utility for the world; they're considering utility for the US. It is not inconsistent to believe that free markets maximize total utility, and also to believe that the US can benefit more (though necessarily at the expense of others) from restricted foreign trade than from free trade.
That's not much different than saying that the 1% get a slice of the cake that's too large and we need regulation, so that more wealth get's distributed to the 99%.
That also still leaves the example of prostitution where more Demorcrats than Republicans are in favor of a free market.
Both Republicans and Democrats don't have context independent views on free markets. It always depends on the case.